Editors’ Introduction

It seems queerly fitting that as this issue closes out our second volume of QTR, it also provides all of us with a series of openings, reminders, even returns, if not always of the happy variety.Many of these are about time, particularly as this issue begins and ends with historical reconsiderations of trans and gender-nonconforming people and practices.Our first article, C. Libby's "Sacred Bodies: Trans Spirituality, Esotericism, and Sex Difference," and our concluding book review, Jordan Chauncy's "Trans Community, Then and Now," on Alicia Spencer-Hall and Blake Gutt's edited collection on Trans and Genderqueer Subjects in Medieval Hagiography, both underscore how gender variation is far from just a "modern" or recent phenomenon, by turning our attention to premodern and then medieval subjects, respectively. 1Indeed, when linked with a number of the key points from the roundtable that anchors the middle section of this issue-on the question "Where Are Queer and Trans Approaches to Biblical and Rabbinic Studies Going?"-it becomes evident not only that gender variation is premodern and medieval, ancient and biblical, but also that it requires that we interrogate the presumptive cisness of our historical pictures and pursuits, an approach Rafael Neis explicates in their contribution to the roundtable.The contributions to this issue, then, join a growing body of scholarship reconsidering, reconfiguring, and remapping the histories of transness, with increasing attention to their emphatically religious, spiritual, and/or scriptural elements or locales. 2 Libby's article foregrounds that while slogans such as "trans people are sacred" are relatively new, trans sacrality has a much longer history.By tracing this longer lineage, their article also critically appraises how claims about the especially spiritual status of trans people can operate.Such work could not come at a better time, which is another way of saying, at a markedly worse time for so, so many, with the accelerating attacks against